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Songs About Nashville, Ranked: From the Lovin' Spoonful to the Beatle Who Botched It

  • Writer: Paul Whitten
    Paul Whitten
  • Jun 16
  • 5 min read

Some cities get a song or two written about them. Nashville is basically a song with a zip code. Walk down Broadway on a Friday night and you'll hear three of them pouring out of three different doorways before you reach the corner. So a while back I started keeping a list. These are my favorite songs about Nashville, ranked from the ones that nail this place to the one a Beatle scribbled at three in the morning and released anyway. Pour something cold. Here we go.


1. "Nashville Cats" by The Lovin' Spoonful

This is the one I'd play first if I only got to play one. John Sebastian wrote it back in 1966, a New York kid fronting a folk-rock band, after he watched some no-name picker stroll into a hotel bar with a beat-up Telecaster and a cheap amp and play like the devil owed him money. The whole song is a love letter to Nashville's session players, the quiet geniuses who made everybody else's records sound like magic. "Play clean as country water," he sings, and he means it as worship. It cracked the Top Ten. Not bad for a band of Greenwich Village longhairs writing a hymn about our guys.


2. "16th Avenue" by Lacy J. Dalton

If you've ever walked one of my tours past Music Row, you've watched me get a little misty about this one. Lacy J. Dalton cut it in 1982, written by a transplant named Thom Schuyler, and it's about as close as the songwriting trade gets to a hymn. Sixteenth Avenue South is a real street, lined with old houses turned into publishing shops, where a thousand hopefuls showed up with a guitar, a notebook, and a prayer. "Here's to the boys who make the noise on Sixteenth Avenue." Dalton sang it to open the CMA Awards that year. Chunks of Music Row are getting bulldozed now, which makes the song ache in a way it didn't used to.


3. "Murder on Music Row" by George Strait & Alan Jackson

Two of the biggest names in country music stood up at the 1999 CMA Awards and accused the whole industry of homicide. The victim? Traditional country, killed off for a pop paycheck. The tune, written by Larry Cordle and Larry Shell, was never even released as a proper single, yet radio spun it so hard it charted anyway and walked off with Song of the Year. "Ol' Hank wouldn't have a chance on today's radio." Agree with it or not, you have to respect the nerve. It's a protest song in a cowboy hat, and it names the very street where the deed was done.


4. "Nashville Skyline Rag" by Bob Dylan

Here's a good one to drop on folks who think they know their Nashville music history. In 1969, Bob Dylan, the protest-folk prophet himself, rolled into town and made a sweet, easygoing country record. "Nashville Skyline Rag" is the instrumental that kicks it off, three minutes of pure picking that exists for one reason, to turn our session aces loose. He cut it at Columbia's Studio A with the best in the business, traded verses with Johnny Cash on the same album, and turned up on the Johnny Cash Show over at the Ryman. Kris Kristofferson once said Dylan opened the doors in this town. A ragtime romp with zero words somehow holds more local history than most songs with a thousand.


5. "Nashville Without You" by Tim McGraw

This is the crowd-pleaser, and I say that with love and a little side-eye. McGraw's 2013 cut is really a roll-call, nearly every legend you can name stitched into one big singalong hook. The man in black, Hank, Merle, Jolene, Galveston, blue eyes crying in the rain. The video struts down Broadway and through the Ryman like a glossy postcard. It's warm, it's polished, and it leans on everybody else's songs to carry the weight. Still, when it comes on in a honky-tonk, the whole room sings every word. That counts for something down here.


6. "Sally G" by Paul McCartney & Wings (Yes, the Worst)

And now the irony I promised you.

Paul McCartney is, arguably, the greatest songwriter who ever drew breath. The man dreamed up "Yesterday" in his sleep. And one of the flimsiest things in his entire catalog just happens to be about Nashville.

In the summer of 1974, McCartney brought Wings to town, went out one night to a little club in Printer's Alley, watched a few country singers do their thing, and scratched out "Sally G" on the ride home. The lyric points right at the spot: "the night life took me down to Printer's Alley." He recorded it at Sound Shop with a room full of genuine Nashville aces. And it is... fine. A corny, featherweight B-side from a man who could do absolutely anything, doing a country song the way a tourist orders sweet tea, gamely, and not quite right.


The Most Ironic Part

Nashville Adventures infographic ranking 6 songs about Nashville, with icons, blue-orange design, and tour promo text.

It even crept onto the country charts, which tells you everything about how forgiving this town can be. The greatest songwriter alive phoned one in, set it on our streets, and Nashville said, "Aw, come on in." I love it anyway. Hold that thought.


Why I Love Every One of These Songs About Nashville

Here's my confession. The ranking is real, but I would not delete a single one of these. They live on the same playlist I've carried around the world, including a long stretch overseas when "home" was more of a word than a place. Country music has a way of finding you in the oddest corners. I once heard a country tune drifting out of a kitchen window in a little village in Armenia, half a planet from Lower Broad, and it stopped me flat in the road.

That's the whole point. Look back at the list. A folk band out of New York. A poet from Minnesota. A bass player from Liverpool who couldn't write a convincing honky-tonk number if his knighthood depended on it. Every last one of them turned toward this town and took their shot. Nashville doesn't gatekeep. It doesn't check your genre card at the door. Music City makes room for the masters and the tourists, the legends and the guy who dashed off "Sally G" in a car and shrugged. This place is for all music, even the folks who can't quite land a country song. Those ones most of all.


One Last Thing

Next time you're downtown, load a few of these up and let them play. And if you want to stand on the actual sidewalk where a Beatle dreamed up his worst song, that one's easy. Printer's Alley is still right there, neon and all, and it's a stop on our Nashville walking tour. We tell the McCartney story right under those lights, along with a couple we save just for the corner. Come find out which songs about Nashville got this place exactly right.

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